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COLLEGE STATION, Texas (AP) — SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said Saturday that combining the TV rights of all conferences to sell together wouldn’t serve as a quick fix for college sports and might not be a fix at all.
Sankey, speaking before the Florida-Texas A&M , outlined why he doesn’t think the pooling of TV rights — an idea that has drawn attention lately — is a good idea. His comments are a direct rebuke of an idea proposed by , Cody Campbell, who said earlier in the week the idea of combining the rights is being held back because “the conferences are all represented by commissioners who are very, very self-interested.”
“Just as we did for expansion, just as we did for our last media rights negotiation, we’ll prepare for our future as the Southeastern Conference,” Sankey said. “I also think it’s important to understand there’s not some tweak to the Sports Broadcasting Act. The interest of networks, the interest of professional leagues, go well beyond just college sports. And that has to be acknowledged as opposed to simply observe (that) here’s a quick fix.”
A bill in Congress co-sponsored by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., calls for a rewrite of the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act, which forbids the conferences from combining their TV rights. Campbell supports that element of Cantwell’s .
In his presentation Thursday to the oversight group, the Knight Commission, Campbell said the move could be worth $7 billion, and said commissioners had told him “privately” that they know a modification of that law would generate more revenue, “but I don’t want to give up control of my own media-rights negotiation.” Campbell is also running commercials during college football, touting a $4 billion to $7 billion revenue increase that could come from pooling and would help save women’s and Olympic sports in college.
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Sankey has denied telling Campbell, publicly or privately, that he agrees with his theory.
On Saturday, the commissioner said the SEC makes well-informed and well-supported decisions and wants the opportunity to negotiate its own deals, not to “turn those over to some unknown, undescribed entity.”
“I also work pretty closely with a variety of folks who are experts in this, who talk directly about value and models for negotiating,” Sankey said. “These other ideas, they have numbers, they’re actually not supported by data. They’re just presented. And anybody can find an expert or two to justify their position. We like to dig into things.”
The SEC recently signed a 10-year TV deal with ESPN worth a reported $3 billion. That figure doesn’t include the approximately $21 million a year it receives for the College Football Playoff, plus extra depending on how many of the league’s teams make the playoff.
The bill Sankey, the NCAA and virtually all of its conferences support is . The act, which, unlike the SAFE Act, does not call for changes to the TV-rights model, proposes limited antitrust protection for the NCAA, mainly from lawsuits involving eligibility issues, and a prohibition on athletes becoming employees of their schools — a development that NCAA executive Tim Buckley said would be “the budget buster of the century” for college sports.
Though momentum for the SCORE Act slowed after an initial burst when it was introduced, Sankey said he believes it has a chance of passing.
“There’s still work happening,” he said. “And I think there’s an opportunity, when you look at the work, to both inform and educate Congress, work with Congress, for us since 2019-2020. This is as close as we’ve been to having either chamber consider legislation on the floor. So, there’s a lot that could be helpful there, and there’s still plenty of work to do.”
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AP National Writer Eddie Pells contributed to this report.
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